Soldiers For Peace International

Our mission is to join individuals and groups working in different ways to ensure that our children live in a rational, sustainable world.
When enough people abandon the belief that war is inevitable,it will become unthinkable.
War is conducted for corporate Empire. Therefore,the first step to ending war is ending corporate control of the US government.
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Sunday, March 29, 2015

The following is the best concise argument I have read for abolishing the CIA, far better than a similar article I had intended to write. The author analyses the dark history of the CIA, for the most part avoiding falling into the trap of making unverifiable statements while mentioning credible claims of incredible actions that have some evidence to back them up.

My only serious complaint about this article is that like many people who have steeped themselves in the realities of the descent of the United States into fascism, he takes a gratuitous swipe at Kennedy. While admitting that JFK was "a work in progress," he minimizes the significance of what he tried to do to end the Cold War. I suggest that anyone who wants to make that claim needs to be prepared to rebut the excellent arguments presented in James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable, and consider how many would have dared to attempt what he did knowing that the CIA was more likely than not to murder him as a result.

George H.W. Bush, the current living elder statesman of the Bush clan, and like the rest of the family politicos, deeply connected with the deep state and its instruments of secret governance. ({parameter.sk)

Many people still think of the CIA as an agency designed to help American presidents make informed decisions about matters outside the United States. That was the basis for President Truman’s signing the legislation which created the agency, and indeed it does serve that role, generally rather inadequately, but it has become something far beyond that.

Information is certainly not something to which any reasonable person objects, but the CIA has two houses under its roof, and it is the operational side of the CIA which gives it a world-wide bad reputation. The scope of undercover operations has evolved to make the CIA into a kind of civilian army, one involving great secrecy, little accountability, and huge budgets – altogether a dangerous development indeed for any country which regards itself as a democracy and whose military is forbidden political activity. After all, the CIA’s secret operational army in practice is not curtailed by restrictions around politics, many of its tasks having been quite openly political. Yes, its charter forbids operations in the United States, but those restrictions have been ignored or bent countless times both in secret programs like Echelon (monitoring telephone communications by five English-speaking allies who then share the information obtained, a forerunner to the NSA’s recently-revealed collection of computer data) and years of mail-opening inside the United States or using substitutes to go around the rule, as was likely the case with the many Mossad agents trailing the eventual perpetrators of 9/11 inside the United States before the event.

The CIA shenanigans and its core style, that of an Ivy League badass fraternity, reflect the existence of a permanent ruling class in the US, a fact said circles try to erase from the public’s consciousness. From the start the agency has seen its mission as a matter of global class preservation, hence it is immune to reform to make it a progressive tool.—Eds.

As with all large, powerful institutions over time, the CIA constantly seeks expansion of its means and responsibilities, much like a growing child wanting ever more food and clothing and entertainment. This inherent tendency, the expansion of institutional empire, is difficult enough to control under normal circumstances, but when there are complex operations in many countries and tens of billions in spending and many levels of secrecy and secret multi-level files, the ability of any elected politicians – whose keenest attention is always directed towards re-election and acquiring enough funds to run a campaign – to exercise meaningful control and supervision becomes problematic at best. The larger and more complex the institution becomes, the truer this is.

Under Eisenhower, the CIA’s operational role first came to considerable prominence, which is hardly surprising considering Eisenhower was a former Supreme Commander in the military, the military having used many dark operations during WWII, operations still classified in some cases. In his farewell address, it is true, Eisenhower gave Americans a dark warning about the “military-industrial complex,” but as President he used CIA dark operations extensively, largely to protect American corporate interests in various parts of the world – everything from oil interests to banana monopolies in Central America. Perhaps, he viewed the approach as less destructive or dangerous or likely to tarnish America’s post-WWII reputation than “sending in the Marines,” America’s traditional gang of paid-muscle for such tasks, but, over the long term, he was wrong, and his extensive use of CIA operations would prove highly destructive and not just tarnish America’s image but totally shatter it. It set in motion a number of developments and problems that haunt America to this day.

BELOW: Five US presidents—all rogues in varying degrees of criminality. The job at this stage of history makes the ability and willingness to participate in international crimes a must-have character quality for any occupant of the White House. (White House, via flickr)

In the 1950s, the CIA was involved in a number of operations whose success bred hubris and professional contempt for those not part of its secret cult, an attitude not unlike that of members of an elite fraternity or secret society at university. The toppling of disliked but democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran and other operations had, by about the time of President Kennedy’s coming to power in 1960, bred an arrogant and unwarranted belief in its ability to do almost anything it felt was needed. The case of Cuba became a watershed for the CIA and its relationship with Presidents of the United States, President Eisenhower and his CIA having come to believe that Castro, widely regarded by the public as a heroic figure at the time, had turned dangerous to American corporate and overseas interests and needed to be removed. Fairly elaborate preparations for doing so were put into place, and parts of the southern United States became large secret training grounds for would-be terrorists selected from the anti-Castro exile community by CIA officers in charge of a project which dwarfed Osama bin Laden’s later camp in the mountains of Afghanistan.

The JFK murder made headlines around the globe. Interest in the crime has never abated. (Credit: Netambulo.com)

A just-elected President Kennedy was faced with a momentous decision: whether to permit and support the invasion of neighboring Cuba, great effort and expense having gone into the scheme. Kennedy supported it with limited reservations, reservations that became the source of the deepest resentment by the old boys at the CIA looking for someone to blame for the invasion’s embarrassing public failure. The truth is the CIA’s plans were ill-considered from the beginning, the product of those arrogant attitudes bred from “successes” such as Guatemala. Cuba was not Guatemala, it had a far larger population, fewer discontented elements to exploit, a cohort of soldiers freshly-experienced from the revolution against former dictator Batista, and Castro was widely regarded as a national hero. The Bay of Pigs invasion never had a chance of success, and the very fact that the CIA put so many resources into it and pressured the President to have it done shows how badly it had lost its way by that time.

UK’s PM Anthony Eden (l) flanked on the right by Eisenhower’s State Dept. Secy, the sinister John Foster Dulles, a Wall Street lawyer. His brother, Allen, ran the CIA. Wall Street’s tentacles have never loosened on America’s main institutions, from the presidency to the country’s intel community. It’s a capitalist intelligence agency above it all.

That failure of the invasion, a highly public failure, created a serious rift between the President and the CIA. When the President, in an unprecedented act, fired three senior CIA figures, holding them responsible for the fiasco, we can only imagine the words that echoed in the halls of Langley. CIA plots against Castro nevertheless carried right on. America was an intensely hostile place on the matter of communism at that time, its press continuously beating the drums, and no President could afford politically to appear even slightly indifferent. Kennedy himself was not quite the peace-loving figure some of his later admirers would hold him to be. He was a work in progress, and he gave speeches often colored by strident martinet and jingo phrases. Secret attempts were made to assassinate Castro, and the Kennedys, at that time, undoubtedly would have been pleased had they succeeded.

BELOW:Dwight D. Eisenhower, Time cover January 4, 1960, “Man of the Year”. He warned us about the “Military-Industrial Complex,” but as President he used CIA dark operations extensively, largely to protect American corporate interests in various parts of the world – everything from oil interests to banana monopolies in Central America. It was he who started America’s meddling in Indochina.

Again, in some these attempts, the CIA went to great and genuinely weird lengths, including an arrangement with Mafia figures, something the public did not know until the 1975 Church Committee looking into illegality in CIA operations. Rumors and threats of another invasion, likely often fed by the CIA itself as psychological warfare against Cuba, led to the confrontation known as the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962. Here, more than ever, the President was ill-served by the CIA and the Pentagon. They wanted an immediate invasion of Cuba when U2 spy cameras detected what appeared to be missile installations under construction, utterly unaware that Russia already had battlefield-ready tactical nuclear weapons mounted on short-range missiles ready to repel an invasion.

It is perhaps a key measure of how far things have deteriorated with the CIA that the Church Committee today appears almost naïve.

The 1975 Church Senate Committee looking into earlier illegality came into being because a number of sources were suggesting the CIA had been engaged in assassination and other dark practices, matters which at that time quite upset the general public and some decent politicians. The names in rumors included Lumumba of Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Diem of Vietnam, Schneider of Chile, and others, but since only part of the Church Report was released we cannot know the full extent of what had been going on. Another possible name is Dag Hammarskjöld of the UN. It is perhaps a key measure of how far things have deteriorated with the CIA that the Church Committee today appears almost naïve. Following the committee’s report, President Ford issued an Executive Order banning assassinations. This was replaced just a few years later by an Executive Order of Ronald Reagan’s, Reagan being a great fan of dark operations, having appointed one of the more dangerous men ever to hold the title of CIA Director, William Casey.

Sen. Frank Church (D-ID). His investigation would be unthinkable today. (US Senate)

The CIA, of course, now runs a regular assassination air force which has killed thousands of innocent people apart from the intended targets, themselves individuals proved guilty of nothing under law. The CIA today thinks nothing of using mass killing to reach desired goals, the Maidan shootings of innocent people demonstrating in Kiev being an outstanding example, shootings which precipitated a coup last year in Ukraine against an elected government. And then there are the trained and armed maniacs which were set loose upon the people of Syria to do pretty much whatever they pleased.

Kennedy managed to resist demands for invasion in 1962, perhaps his one great achievement as President, and he took another path that eventually led to an agreement with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. (This after imprudently leading the world to the edge of nuclear war.—Eds) That agreement, which included America’s pledge not to invade Cuba, made Kennedy a marked man. He was hated by the fanatical and well-armed Cuban émigré community, and he was hated by all the men who had devoted a fair part of their lives to eliminating Castro, the émigrés’ recruiters, trainers, handlers, and suppliers – members all of the CIA country club set whose commie-hatred was so intense it could make the veins in their foreheads pop. Some at the CIA were undoubtedly even further irked by backchannel communications that opened up between Kennedy and Khrushchev, and tentative efforts to open something of that nature with Castro. They weren’t supposed to know about these efforts, but they almost certainly did.

It is difficult today for people to grasp the intensity of anti-communist and anti-Castro feelings that pervaded America’s establishment in 1963, more resembling a religious hysteria than political views. One thing is absolutely clear, Kennedy’s assassination was about Cuba, and it was conceived out of a simmering conviction that Kennedy literally was not fit to be President. No important person who ever expressed a quiet opinion on the matter – including Mrs. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and some members of the Warren Commission – ever believed the fantasy story fashioned by the Warren Commission. Neither did informed observers abroad – the Russian and French governments for example later expressed their views – as well as a great many ordinary Americans.

Other facts about Kennedy undoubtedly added to the volatile reactions of the plotters, facts not known by the public until decades later, one fact in particular was his relatively long and intense affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer, a highly intelligent woman, socialite, and former wife of a senior CIA agent, Cord Meyer, who for a time ran Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Kennedy and Mary Meyer are said to have had long talks about world affairs and prospects for peace, and she also is said to have introduced Kennedy to marijuana and LSD, he, given his chronic back pain, willing to try almost anything. She kept a diary that was known to the CIA’s James Angleton because he was discovered searching for it after her mysterious, professional hit-style murder in 1964 (small calibre bullet by a gun held to the head). One can only imagine the raised eyebrows of CIA officials when they learned about drugs and Mary’s influence on Kennedy (could some of their numerous meetings possibly not have been bugged?). Double betrayal over Cuba, backchannel communications with Russia, and drugs and sex with an artistic, intellectual type – those surely would have made the men who decided the fates of leaders in much lesser places extremely uneasy about the future.

My focus is not the assassination, but I’ve gone into some length because I believe it was a defining event in relations between future Presidents and the CIA. After this, every President would work under its rather frightening shadow.

Lyndon Johnson was ready from day one to give the CIA anything it wanted. Whether Johnson was involved in the assassination as some plausibly believe, or whether he was just intimidated by those involved – after all, like all bullies, Johnson was at heart a coward as he demonstrated numerous times. He wasn’t long in launching the most vicious and pointless war since World War II with the cheap trick of a story about an attack upon American ships. The CIA got right into the fun in 1965 with its Operation Phoenix, which over some years involved tens of thousands of silent assassinations of village leaders and others by night-crawling Special Forces soldiers guided to their targets by CIA agents.

Like all the CIA’s more lunatic operations – this one just kept running until at least 1972 – chalking up a toll of murders estimated as high as 40,000 and proving a complete failure in its goal of securing America’s artificial rump-state of South Vietnam. It was madness to be involved in Vietnam, and it proved in the end infinitely more embarrassing and destructive to America’s morale and reputation than the Bay of Pigs invasion, but then more a few people who knew and worked with Johnson have said that he was pretty much mad himself. The CIA fed Johnson the kind of things he wanted to hear, but the War in Vietnam was always characterized by poor intelligence, and when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the huge, surprise of the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Washington was hit by an earthquake, and a lot of people suddenly understood Vietnam was a lost cause. Johnson, always the coward, his party starting to split into factions over the matter, announced his resignation not long after.

Of course, the truth is that the information side of the CIA’s house has never been very good at its work. Apart from the abject failures of Vietnam, the CIA is said to have never once got the most critical assessments of the Cold War era, those of the Soviet Union’s economic and military strength, anywhere close to accurate. There were many reasons for that, but the perceived need to exaggerate your enemy’s strength to inflate the size of CIA budgets was an important one. Whether Big Intelligence ever really works in obtaining reliable information and reliable information that will be used by politicians is certainly a topic open for discussion. The most successful information-gathering intelligence service of the early Cold War, the KGB, often had its sometimes remarkable material questioned or cast aside by Stalin.

Richard Nixon’s demise in the Watergate scandal likely was served up by CIA dirty tricks. The Watergate break-in was in mid-1972, although it took more than two years before Nixon resigned. Some of the old CIA hands who worked for Nixon’s secret “plumber’s unit,” a private operations group which did jobs like breaking in to the Watergate Hotel offices of the Democrats, had a history going back to the assassination. They undoubtedly kept Langley informed of what steps they were being ordered to take. Nixon was a problem for some of the CIA’s darkest secrets: he was jealous and bitter towards the Kennedys for beating him in the 1960 election (he also knew election fraud was used), and he had an obsessive curiosity about the assassination, having made a number of attempts to ascertain just what happened for which he was rebuffed.

A possible second reason for the CIA’s wanting to dump Nixon was the deteriorated situation in Vietnam. The Paris Peace Accords were signed early in 1973, however there is evidence that Nixon and Kissinger actually put forward their proposals in the hope that they would be rejected and Congress then would allow them a free hand in seeking a clearer victory. But by that time even the CIA recognized the war in Vietnam could not be won by conventional means and that the interests of the United States were being damaged by its continuation. Despite press blurbs about peace, Nixon always desperately wanted to triumph in Vietnam, having gone so far in secret as to discuss the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Despite various speculations, we have never learned just what Nixon’s burglars were after at the Watergate, and the reason for that may just well be the CIA’s having baited him with false information about what might be discovered there. The job very likely was deliberately sabotaged when old CIA hands do things like sloppy door-taping. The neat little trick alerted a security guard and led to the whole long Watergate Affair and Nixon’s eventual resignation, just the kind of neat outcome operations-types love to chuckle over at expense account lunches.

George H. W. Bush senior, the man for whom the Langley headquarters is named was more than a short-term appointed CIA Director. He had a long but never acknowledged background in CIA, a fact which has come to light from a few references in obscure documents obtained by assassination researchers over decades. He almost certainly was involved with the operations against Castro before the assassination. He was likely America’s first official CIA President. One of the regular activities of the CIA abroad is to pay secret pensions to likely future leaders in select countries so that they will be both beholden and in a position to be compromised. They do this in dozens of significant countries as part of an effort to control future relations with America. So why not take a similar approach to leadership inside the United States? The first clear example was George H. W. Bush whose single term as President gave the CIA several schemes abroad dear to their hearts, including setting up Saddam Hussein for invasion after his foolish invasion of Kuwait (done following the seeming approval of the United States’ ambassador to Iraq), and the invasion of Panama in 1989. Panama’s General Noriega had apparently done the unforgivable thing of setting up “honey traps” in which American diplomats and CIA officials were photographed having sex, giving Noriega a powerful weapon against Washington’s interference. So he was set up on drug charges – which may or may not have been true, but they were not the business of American justice – other provocations were arranged like a silly stunt about an American sailor being beaten up, and Noriega’s country promptly was invaded.

Of course George Bush Junior was not CIA, lacking the fundamental requirement of a decent brain. But his presidency was effectively America’s first dual presidency, with Dick Cheney serving as senior partner despite his lesser title, and Dick Cheney was CIA-connected, having served as Secretary of Defense under George Bush’s father, overseen such operations as Desert Storm, and after George H. W.’s election defeat, serving as Chairman and CEO of Halliburton, a gigantic oil services company which operates all over the globe. Such companies – in much the same fashion as large American news organizations such as Time-Life, CBS, or The New York Times – notoriously are well connected with the CIA. Because companies like Halliburton operate in scores of countries, deal with strategic resources, travel to remote sites, and often have access to important figures, they provide perfect cover for CIA agents and other intelligence assets. The Bush-Cheney period was certainly a golden one for the CIA in terms of institutional growth and new projects. Many ugly projects now making our world a less secure place were started in this period.

The CIA now is so firmly entrenched and so immensely well financed – much of it off the books, including everything from secret budget items to peddling drugs and weapons – that it is all but impossible for a president to oppose it the way Kennedy did. Obama, who has proved himself a fairly weak character from the start, certainly has given the CIA anything it wants. The dirty business of ISIS in Syria and Iraq is one project. The coup in Ukraine is another. The pushing of NATO’s face right against Russia’s borders is still another. Several attempted coups in Venezuela are still more. And the creation of a drone air force for extrajudicial killing in half a dozen countries is yet another. They don’t resemble projects we would expect from a smiley-faced, intelligent man who sometimes wore sandals and refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel during his first election campaign.

More than one observer has speculated about Obama’s being CIA, and there are significant holes in his resume which could be accounted for by his involvement. He would have been an attractive candidate for several reasons. Obama is bright, and the CIA employs few blacks in its important jobs. He also might have been viewed as a good political prospect for the future in just the way foreign politicians are selected for secret pensions. After all, before he was elected, there were stories about people meeting this smart and (superficially) charming man and remarking that they may just have met a future president.

If Obama is not actually CIA, then he is so intimidated that he pretty much rubber stamps their projects. A young, inexperienced President must always be mindful of that other young President whose head was half blown off in the streets of Dallas. Moreover, there are some shady areas in Obama’s background around drugs and perhaps other matters which could be politically compromising. The CIA is perfectly capable of using anything of that nature for political exposure while making it look as though it came from elsewhere.

So, when people write of America’s secret government or of its government within the government, it is far more than an exaggeration. It is actually hard to imagine now any possibility of someone’s being elected President and opposing what the CIA recommends, the presidency having come to resemble in more than superficial ways the Monarchy in Britain. The Queen is kept informed of what Her government is doing, but can do nothing herself to change directions. Yes, the President still has the power on paper to oppose any scheme, and then so does the Queen simply by refusing her signature, but she likely could exercise that power just once. In her case the consequence would be an abrupt end to the Monarchy. In a President’s case, it would be either a Nixonian or Kennedyesque end.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

I wrote this article as an example of how to break through the corporate media with editorials explaining important facts that syndicated columnists and mainstream media reporters are clueless about. While this type of article is unlikely to ever make the New York Times, there are many newspapers that will publish well-supported guest editorials.

I hope it will be read with an eye to understanding how to communicate with the general public on the US Deep State as much as for what it has to say about that topic itself.

Truth is the first casualty of war. Engaged in an
unprecedented state of endless war to fight the phantom enemy of “terrorism,” it
has never been so important that Americans understand this. They must recognize
that like throwing gasoline on a fire, fighting terrorism with military means
only makes it worse. ISIS did not arise spontaneously. It is the result of the
US government manipulating public opinion to support policies unthinkable
before 9/11 and that have remained unquestioned. Americans have been duped into
accepting the use of terrorists for proxy wars in Libya and Syria. The US is
ultimately responsible for the atrocities being committed by ISIS and will bear
the brunt of the blame for making the problem worse if it supports further
violence in the region.

Mark Twain observed: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s
what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Self-governing nations have the morally
responsibility to understand why they are at war. That means seeking answers to
questions beyond the superficial ones posed by the mainstream media. Despite
the widespread distrust of most US news sources by both those who consider themselves
liberal and those who consider themselves conservative, we continue to get most
of our information from these corporate-funded sources whose main goal is
profit, not enlightenment. News is therefore framed to reinforce self-serving
myths that increase profit industries connected to war and the police state
apparatus that supports it.

There are many reasons that the news industry has become stenographers for
politicians and the economic elite most represent. Concealing the abuses of corporate
power maintains advertising revenue and profits the six megacorporations that own most of the media and have interests in many other industries. Failing to cover
the issues during political campaigns leaves a void they can fill with
enormously profitable campaign ads. Omitting important information about world
events and providing superficial analysis of what is covered keeps us ignorant
of the real goals of US foreign policy, which can only be understood by
studying the underlying power structure of the US and the world. That
information is not taught in school and is not talked about in the corporate media
but must be sought after.

Friday, December 5, 2014

The US may understand the consequences of imperial overreach
sooner than anyone thought possible. Russia’s decision to drop the South Stream
natural gas pipeline in favor of a deal with key NATO member Turkey may be the
first of a series of events that could challenge and ultimately destroy the Anglo-American
empire. Turkey’s bold decision risks its
standing with its western allies by undercutting the EU’s efforts to bully
Russia, but promises enormous benefit to Turkey’s economic influence in Europe.

While President Erdogan hasn’t shown his full hand, it may play out such that
the West’s quixotic quest to control the Mideast could end sooner than seemed
possible. EU and US insults to Turkey have driven it into Russian arms. The
anti-Putin coalition seems to have burned both bridges between Eastern fossil
fuel sources and Western markets. Energy costs to citizens of EU nations will
skyrocket. If they protest vigorously enough, their puppet governments may
finally decide that their cozy relationships with the Anglo-American alliance
are not worth the cost.

Turkey has been rebuffed repeatedly in its efforts to join the EU. That is an insult
to a proud nation, a member of NATO with a stronger economy than many of the former
Soviet satellites. These weaker nations joined this coalition of Western
belligerents after the fall of the USSR, violating 1994 agreements by NATO not
to expand toward Russian borders. Unlike
Turkey, many of them were also enticed to join the EU. None of these newer
states have benefited much from inclusion in Europe’s economy. They are
suffering from the same austerity measures as the rest of the EU. Like Ukraine,
corruption has remained as endemic in many countries under its governance as it
was under the old Soviet system.

A number of these Eastern European nations would have benefited from South
Stream, getting access to cheap gas and profiting from transit fees. Politicians in Bulgaria, which in 2013 witnessed
some of the largest demonstrations in Europe since the crash, initially lobbied
for the pipeline but ultimately sided with the EU against their own national
interests. Now Bulgarians will pay the price along with the rest of the EU for
its outrageous demand that Russia surrender ownership of the pipeline. This was
a condition of the Third
Energy Package, which Russia never ratified.
It was designed to punish Russia for
refusing to privatize its fossil fuel industry during the looting of Russia
that followed the Yeltsin coup. Some speculate that Bulgaria or Greece
might make separate deals with Russia for gas via subsidiary pipelines, the
price for which may be other economic and even military alliances.

According to some analysts, the last straw for Turkey was US arming of the Kurdish
fighters in Syria, which Turkey considers allied with the PKK, Kurdish separatists
who are listed by both Turkey and the US as a terrorist group. The US states
that the change in policy was for the humanitarian purpose of protecting the residents
of the Syrian border town of Kobani from ISIS siege. However, US bombing did little
to effectively degrade ISIS forces before the mercenary army invaded Kobani and
melted into the city. Now, air strikes that might hit the terrorist
infiltrators would be as likely to kill remaining civilians.

Arming of the PYD (the Syrian Kurdish defense forces) led to the natural
suspicion that Turkey was being pressured to invade Syria in self-defense. The
US had been demanding that Turkey supply the ground troops to fight ISIS, which
sprang from the NATO/GCC/Israeli attempt to use terrorists to topple Assad. Erdogan’s
government has been deeply involved in providing routes for terrorists and
weapons to enter Syria since the outbreak of the “civil war,” along with
limited military assistance. He has insisted on a plan prioritizing the defeat
of the Assad government rather than ISIS, over which Western intelligence
agencies seem to still exercise some control. All of these conflicts have
followed US finger pointing at Turkey’s complicity in the creation of ISIS,
while ignoring its own role.

US foreign policy is driven by the ambitions of the psychopaths on Wall Street
who virtually run the government. They are guided by the knowledge of the
inevitable failure of the dollar. This is the reason that the US has been
waging all-out war for global corporate domination. The manic military policies
of the last two administrations are a last ditch effort to control fossil fuel
supplies and transit routes not just for profit, but to continue to prop up the
Petrodollar. It may be too late. Russia and China are taking the lead in
weaning themselves from dependence on the dollar not only to sell or buy fossil
fuels but for other goods. The two nations signed an agreement in October to
settle international debts in their own currencies. That trade is projected to
more than double by 2020 to $200 billion. Meanwhile, the BRICS bank may ultimately free
other nations from dollar domination by providing an alternative to the IMF,
whose loan conditions include removing currency controls designed to prevent
Western speculators from destabilize their national currencies.

The key event to watch out for is the response of Angela Merkel. With the
largest economy in Europe, Germany has the biggest voice in the EU and weaker
states are sure to follow its lead. Merkel has been largely cooperating with
the sanctions on Russia, while at the same time speaking out against more
draconian measures for the most part. As with Obama, her bombastic claims about
“Russian imperialism” in the Ukraine are for domestic consumption. The German
industrialists whose interests she represents understand this, but have been concerned
about the effects of the sanctions on the national and EU economies, which have
been teetering toward yet another recession. The loss of cheap gas from Russia may
be the one consequence of slavish adherence to US foreign policy objectives
they will not tolerate.

If ordinary Germans join influential business leaders in Germany in calling for
an end to allowing the US to dictate its foreign policies, the question of the
wisdom of EU support for NATO might arise with the general public. If so, the
revolt could spread elsewhere. Eventually, the contagion of rebellion could
even reach US shores. A lot depends on how willing normally staid German
society is willing to demand an end to its government’s complicity in yet
another attempt at establishing what amounts to global fascism. They are
already angry at revelations of US spying on their government officials and of
CIA manipulation of their corporate media. Having already experienced the
consequences of allowing their government to engage in imperialist wars, they
may rise to stop it this time around. We can only hope that generations of
post-war prosperity have not made them as docile as their American
counterparts.

The question has become one of how much Europeans are willing to bear to sustain
a global system that is nearing its end. The cost of the collapse of the
financialized, debt-based world economy is leaving them and the entire developed
world with declining living standards and mounting debt. Meanwhile, the rich
get richer. It is only a matter of time before Europe wakes up to what the
developing nations have always known: Capitalism is based on exploitation and
its aim is to monopolize resources for the benefit of the few. All that remains
to be seen is whether the People unite to take down this system before the only
way to fight the police state Europe and the US are becoming is violence.

As this global game of Monopoly winds down to its conclusion, at some point the
people of the world must rise up and change the rules of the game. The
alternative is economic chaos and suffering on a scale never before witnessed,
followed by the consignment of our children and all future generations to debt
slavery.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

Today's blog is by one of today's most insightful commentators on both American and international politics, Tony Carlucci. As usual, he takes an observation that many people have noted and examines it a bit deeper, resulting in some important conclusions.

Despite starting out unifying people around concern about a growing police state, Ferguson became a source of division as people fell into their self-selected roles as defenders of "conservatism" and "liberalism." In the end, the massive protests just reflect the divisions that were already there, and protesters asking for justice from a system built on injustice are opposed by half of America.

Carlucci makes a strong argument for an alternative to protest against the system, one that has the potential to unify citizens. Instead of focusing on tearing down the existing system, he argues that we need to devote our energy to building a parallel system that will displace it.This article appeared in nsnbc news.

Ferguson and the False Promise of Revolution

Tony Cartalucci (LD) : When faced on the battlefield with a numerically superior enemy, one must attempt to divide his enemy into smaller, more easily dispatched opponents, or even more ideally, divide them against one another, and have them defeat each other without ever drawing your sword. For Wall Street's 0.1%, divide and conquer is a way of life.

Divide and Conquer - Never in human history has there been a more effective way for tyrants to rule over large groups of people who, should they ever learn to cooperate, would easily throw off such tyranny.

Image:Zululand lies in flaming ruins, its legendary army decimated, but the British were not about to take any chances of allowing them to unite and resit again. They divided the defeated nation into 14 chiefdoms each headed by leaders harboring dislike for the others ensuring perpetual infighting and a divided, weakened Zululand never again to rise and challenge British subjugation.

At the conclusion of the Anglo-Zulu War, the British despoiled Zululand, divided it into 14 separate cheifdoms, each led by a proxy obedient to the British Empire. The British ensured that these 14 cheifdoms harbored animosities toward one another and fostered petty infighting between them to ensure British interests would never again be challenged by a unified Zulu threat. Before the British, the Romans would employ similar tactics across Germania and Gual.

In this way, the British Empire and the Romans managed to not only decimate their enemies, but by keeping them perpetually infighting, divided, and at war with one another, manged to keep them subservient to imperial rule for generations.

But one would be mistaken to believe that imperialism is only waged abroad. Imperialism is as much about manipulating, controlling, and perpetuating subservience at home as it is projecting hegemony abroad. For the imperialist, all of humanity represents a sea of potential usurpers. The systematic division, weakening, and subjugation of various social groups along political, religious, class, or racial lines has proven an ageless solution for the elite.

One remembers the infamous use of Christians as a scapegoat for the corruption of Roman Emperor Nero, deflecting public anger away from the ruling elite and unto others among the plebeians.

This is a game that has continued throughout the centuries and continues on to this very day. While racial, religious, and political divisions are aspects of human nature, they are viciously exploited by the ruling elite to divide and destroy any capacity of the general public to organize, resist, or compete with established sociopolitical and economic monopolies.

Ferguson - Playing America Like a Fiddle - Before protests began breaking out in Ferguson, Missouri, and even after the first of the protests in August, many across America's polarized "left/right" paradigm began to find a common ground, shocked at the level of militarization the police had undergone and the heavy-handed response they exercised amid protests. Even among the generally pro-police and military "right," there was concern over what was finally recognized as a growing and quite menacing "police state" in America.

Politicians, the corporate media, and security agencies set off to work, dividing America's public down very predictable lines. Convenient "revelations" that the police were connected with the ultra-racist Ku Klux Klan, coupled with growing choruses across the right to circle the wagons in support of the militarized police attempted to place those who converged on this common ground back into their assigned places on the "right" and "left" of America's ultimately Wall Street-controlled political order.

Regardless of its success, attempts to intentionally provoke violence, confusion, and division on both sides is an attempt by the establishment to keep people divided and weak while maintaining their position of primacy over the country and the expansive "international order" it imposes globally. It was this establishment, in fact, that intentionally militarized the police, intentionally cultivates both institutional racism as well as sociopolitical and economic rot in America's inner cities, creating breeding grounds of violence and crime. So busy is America managing the predictable conflict amongst themselves, they have neither the time nor the energy to recognize their true tormentors.

In reality, the police and protesters and those across America and around the world "picking sides" have more in common with one another than the government and corporate-financier interests that reign in Washington and on Wall Street.

Get Off the Hamster Wheel - One cannot accomplish anything by burning down one's own community, killing one another, or complaining and protesting endlessly. Real revolution is not taking to the streets and destroying a political order, it is creating a new order that displaces the old.

The American Revolution, for instance, occurred after the colonies established their own economic system, as well as their own militias, political networks, and infrastructure. The violence broke out only after the British tried to reassert themselves amid the steady process of being displaced. By the time shots were being fired, the real revolution had already occurred - the subsequent war was to defend its success.

Today, the establishment constitutes unchecked, unwarranted power and influence held by the corporate-financier elite - an establishment we are in fact paying into daily every time we patronize their businesses, use their services, associate with their institutions, and pay in attention and time to their propaganda and political agenda we ourselves should be setting and executing. Ironically many of both the police and protesters clashing in Ferguson on opposite sides of the "conflict" have homes full of Wall Street's goods, and subscriptions to many of their services.

Indeed, Walmart ends up filling our homes with most of the consumer products we depend on in America. A handful of agricultural giants feed us. A handful of pharmaceutical giants medicate us. A handful of energy monopolies light our homes and fuel our vehicles. You could fill a single sheet of paper with the names of corporate-financier interests that rule over nearly every aspect of our lives.

Such monopolies exist because they have extinguished competitors. Ensuring that competition remains extinguished means creating a society that is incapable of producing individuals or paradigms capable of challenging their established order. This includes sabotaging the education system, creating a socioeconomic system that encourages unsustainable dependence rather than self-sufficiency and independence, and rigging rules, regulations, and laws against any potential upstarts.

The notion of Ferguson protesters demanding justice from a system created of injustice, upon injustice, is as absurd as trying to squeeze apple juice from a lemon. It is the definition of fantastical futility.

Instead of demanding justice, jobs, education, healthcare, food, and other necessities and desires from a system with no intention of ever empowering the people - a system that in order to continue perpetuating itself must by necessity never truly empower the people - we must begin working together locally to empower ourselves.

Power stems from infrastructure and institutions - and locally this can be accomplished in innumerable ways. Already farmers' markets, organic cooperatives, makerspaces, churches, community centers, community gardens, and charities along with innovative small businesses leveraging technology to do locally what once required global spanning industry to accomplish, all constitute the seeds of this shifting paradigm. For communities unlucky enough not to have one of these above institutions, or a lack of them, instead of baying for blood in the streets, burning building down, or clashing with police, build them.

The alternative media itself is proof of what power people have when they stop depending on others, stop demanding others to do their jobs properly, and instead take up the responsibility themselves. Expanding this paradigm shift to other aspects of our daily lives, from agriculture to energy, to education, will be key to true and enduring change.

Ferguson teaches us that real change in the mind of many is still far off. America isn't on the edge of revolution. A hamster wheel endlessly spinning has no "edge." Those picking sides and bickering over the events in Ferguson are playing into an elementary strategy of divide and conquer. We are divided, Wall Street has conquered.

At the end of it all, Wall Street comes out even stronger. Because in the smoking remnants of our communities after all is said and done, we have even less with which to build an alternative to the system we live trapped within. Divided, we have half the people we should be joining together with, collaborating and building together with, to build the world we want to live in tomorrow.

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Interviews with Dr Staggenborg

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OUR GOAL: The eradication of war by restoring democracy in America.

OUR MISSION: To challenge the US Congress to put the needs of the people above those of their corporate sponsors. We can only establish democracy in America and the world by working together to abolish the "rights" of corporations to determine the collective destiny of the Peoples of the United States and of the world.

THE PROBLEM: is not that the American government does not work. It works fine for the corporations that own it, just not for the people of America. It is corporate control of Congress that permits the enslavement of Peoples of other nations.

Now that the corporate Puppetmasters are bringing their tools of subjugation to the United States, we must fight back together to ensure that governments of the People, by the People and for the People do not perish from the Earth.

Together, we can mend the social fabric of a broken nation and assure liberty and justice for all the Peoples of the planet we share.

War and lack of health care are symptoms of the same disease: corporate control of the US government. That is why we must take back America for the people by working to pass a Constitutional amendment to abolish get corporate money out of elections.

Until Americans learn to fight the corporate enemy instead of each other, there is no reason to expect real change. We must put aside our differences to fight the imposition of a corporate New World Order if we are going to ensure that our children grow up in a rational, sustainable world where war is but a memory.